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The endless motorcades and wail of sirens in Washington this week made it seem as if the President were travelling non-stop around the city, or receiving a bevy of foreign dignitaries. As it happened, it was National Police Week, and the ceremonial convoys were carrying the families of police officers, from around the country, who had been killed in the line of duty. Donald Trump was leaving for China. Some supporters expressed concern for his safety. (“I don’t feel good about President Trump going to China tomorrow,” Glenn Beck wrote on X. “I pray everything goes well, but I wish I trusted the Secret Service.”) Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s counterterrorism chief, announced that Trump kept a letter in the Resolute Desk in which, in the President’s words, he provided “very firm instructions” for what Vice-President J. D. Vance should do if a foreign nation like China were to “take him out.”

Quotidian rhythms continued. On Tuesday evening, on the steps of the Capitol, House members made their way down the stairs after casting their votes, some alone, others flanked by staff or trailed by a Hill reporter. A line of cars had materialized to collect them; it was like a school-pickup line. “How was your recess?” I heard someone ask. (Congress was on break last week.) “Where do you normally pick the congresswoman up?” a staffer said into her phone, trying to find her boss’s driver. One member lit a cigar.

Air Force One took off from Joint Base Andrews, carrying Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Sean Hannity, and Elon Musk, among others accompanying the President to a two-day summit with China’s President, Xi Jinping. Hegseth had started his day on the Hill, facing questions in a budget hearing about the cost of the war in Iran. Rubio was travelling in a tracksuit called the Nike Tech Venezuela, an homage to Nicolás Maduro’s outfit when he was captured, in the middle of the night, by U.S. forces in Caracas and taken to a jail in Brooklyn. The culinary team on Air Force One served beef stir fry and fortune cookies to the delegation.

Outside the Capitol, House Speaker Mike Johnson descended the stairs to a lectern. He and the House Law Enforcement Caucus were holding a candlelight vigil for the fallen police officers. “At this moment in our country and its history, it’s not lost on anyone that we’re living through some troubling times,” Johnson said. Behind him, members of Congress held plastic candles for the cameras. “There is a battle right now between good and evil,” Johnson continued. “We all feel it.” He called up a teen-ager named Chloe Rice-Timmins, who talked about the day she found out that her stepfather, Tyler, had been shot and killed while trying to recover a stolen car; he had never missed one of her soccer games. A family playing with their kids on the Capitol lawn stopped to watch the vigil. Chloe’s mother went up to the lectern and described taking Tyler off a ventilator in the hospital. Two staffers next to me whispered to each other, catching up about their week off. A Capitol Police officer with a long gun stood in the background, in between the columns outside the entrance to the House chamber, looking out over the Hill. As the sun set, Johnson quoted Proverbs 28:1. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” he said. “The righteous are as bold as a lion.” At a bar a few blocks away, Senator Rand Paul’s son got drunk and tried to start a fight with the congressman Mike Lawler, whom he misidentified as Jewish before remarking that “you Jews” could cause Thomas Massie to lose his primary next week.

On the National Mall, where Trump’s new tinge of paint made its way up the basin of the Reflecting Pool, three video-game consoles had been installed with an interactive game called Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell. It allowed players to simulate the Iran war. A few National Guard members took turns trying out the arcade game for a couple of minutes. I made my way downtown as one of the Police Week convoys sped in the opposite direction. Outside night clubs on Connecticut Avenue, girls hung out of the sunroofs of idling cars, cheering on the cops. Dozens of classic police cars from various departments were parked in front of the White House. A few men in red “Make Copcars Great Again” hats posed with the vehicles.

Inside the White House complex, a slightly languid mood, typical during a President’s foreign trip, prevailed. “I had lots of weird week-long, empty, ghostly West Wing days,” an official from a previous Administration recalled to me. “The structuring principle of everybody’s day is gone. Getting decisions out of the travelling crew is extremely difficult.” These were days for doctors’ appointments, haircuts, long lunches, coming in late and leaving early. “There’s also the question of, actually, can the government function normally for a week because the chaos has gone elsewhere?” the former official said.

On Wednesday, Vance and Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, were in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building talking about hospice. They invited reporters to the Indian Treaty Room, an ornate space where Dwight Eisenhower hosted the first televised Presidential press conference, in 1955; the walls are lined with panels of French and Italian marble, interspersed with cast-iron moldings of dolphins. “As you know, the President just landed in China a few hours ago,” Vance said. “I don’t travel outside of the country with the President. So, on days like today, I sometimes feel like Macaulay Culkin in ‘Home Alone.’ I walk into the White House and it’s very quiet and no one’s there, and it takes me a second to realize exactly what’s going on.” He paused, expecting laughter.

A dozen staffers from Vance’s fraud task force, a recently instated committee purportedly aimed at sniffing out misuse of federal funds, filed in. Oz announced a national moratorium on new hospice and home-health-care agencies, where, he said, “we see a lot of fraud.” I stood next to Gorka, the counterterrorism official, who was tweeting and looking at responses to the posts regarding his comments on Trump’s “if I die” letter. “It’s hard to get the whole machinery of government moving,” Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, who, with Vance, runs the fraud task force, said. Oz applauded the group’s “spirit and desire to harness a group of stallions”: they were saving his vulnerable department, which he described as “a large rhino that can be stabbed effortlessly by foreign governments, syndicated criminal entities, and smaller-time operators who can take advantage of a system.” The group took questions on topics such as how many dead Americans were fraudulently receiving food-stamp benefits.

The night Trump left for China, he had posted on Truth Social about all the business leaders travelling there with him. “It is an Honor to have Jensen, Elon, Tim Apple, Larry Fink, Stephen Schwarzmann, Kelly Ortberg (Boeing), Brian Sikes (Cargill), Jane Fraser (Citi), Larry Culp (GE Aerospace), David Solomon (Goldman Sachs), Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron), Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm), and many others journeying to the Great Country of China where I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level!” Jensen Huang, the founder and C.E.O. of Nvidia, was reportedly added to the trip at the last minute; he boarded Air Force One during a refuelling stop in Alaska, carrying his own bag. Brett Ratner, who directed “Melania,” a recent documentary about the First Lady, came along in part to scout locations for “Rush Hour IV.” (The project of turning Melania into a celebrity in China is also apparently under way. “Maybe releasing the movie there will be a deliverable?” the official mused.) Trump’s son Eric, who runs the Trump Organization, also joined; Trump owns dozens of trademarks in China. When one former diplomat commented on X that there appeared to be no China experts on the plane to advise the President ahead of his meetings with Xi, the White House communications director, Steve Cheung, responded, “You have no idea what you’re talking about you slope-brained, mouth breathing moron. Stop calling yourself an expert in anything, aside from sucking.”) Upon arrival at Beijing Capital International Airport, some C.E.O.s got off the plane with the Cabinet members, descending from stairs that led out onto a red carpet, as opposed to following the convention of exiting from the back of the plane, with staff. There were other questions of protocol. China is one of the hardest settings for secure communication. Those on the travelling delegation are expected to leave their personal devices at home; they get burner laptops and phones. U.S. digital-lockdown practice requires even the President to leave his normal phone behind. Had Trump really handed his in?

When Trump landed in Beijing, the House unanimously passed a resolution calling on him to demand the release of political prisoners such as Jimmy Lai, who published a pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong, and was sentenced earlier this year to twenty years in prison for allegedly colluding with foreign forces. When asked about Lai before his departure, Trump said, “It’s like saying to me, ‘if Comey ever went to jail, would you let him out?’ Might be a hard one for me—because he’s a dirty cop.” Lai “isn’t that way,” he went on, but “he caused lots of turmoil for China.” There were other things to focus on. “He’s been salivating over this trip for months and talking about what a great time he had in 2017,” Julian Gewirtz, a senior researcher on China at Columbia University, who is writing a book on the evolution of U.S.-China relations, told me. “He tells this story about the perfectly even heights of the helmets of the Chinese honor guard that you could send a billiard ball down. He has clearly been excited for the pageantry and the dealmaking—a boatload of Fortune 100 C.E.O.s walking into the room behind him, inking deals that he gets credit for, in a setting of extraordinary grandeur.” Trump had originally been scheduled to travel to Beijing in March, but the visit was derailed by his war with Israel in Iran. The timing was inopportune. “He and his advisers knew that, politically, the optics of him doing all of that would be damaging right as the war was getting under way,” Gewirtz told me. Now Trump and Xi were said to be mulling over a deal in which China would invest a trillion dollars in America.

No matter the stakes of the bilateral relationship, the trip was something of a respite from what the President faced at home. Upon Trump’s arrival at the Great Hall of the People, hundreds of Chinese schoolchildren greeted him, jumping up and down and waving flowers and small flags, both Chinese and American. He stood on a red-and-gold dais as cannon fire rang out across Tiananmen Square, and a Chinese military band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” At the state banquet, another military band played “Y.M.C.A.,” one of Trump’s favorite songs. His delegation sat, “Dr. Strangelove”-style, opposite their Chinese counterparts, at a round table. The meetings were “wonderful,” Musk said. “Historically, Chinese leaders came to the United States as China was rising, because they wanted to stand on the White House lawn, or in the Rose Garden, with the American President,” Gewirtz told me. Such setups, he said, were understood as helping to burnish China’s image, and the images of its leaders. “The profound irony of Trump going to China at this particular moment is that it does appear that the tables have turned, and he is there, in part, because he wants the lustre and swagger of being on that particular stage as a dealmaker. He is going to draw attention to himself in this setting that he sees as enhancing his persona.” Back in D.C., the House celebrated National Scam Survivor Day; the Congressional-Executive Commission on China held a hearing on forced organ harvesting. ♦

Local elections in England—to town and city and rural councils across the country—are usually low-turnout affairs, in which the national government of the day takes a bit of a shellacking, apologizes, reassures voters that it is paying attention to the stuff that they actually care about (usually garbage collection, or the state of the roads), and then moves on without a second thought. That didn’t happen this year. The results on May 7th, which coincided with elections for the national assemblies in Scotland and Wales, proved to be a catastrophe for the Labour Party and a personal crisis for Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister.

Starmer, who is sixty-three, has been a national figure in Britain for the past six years—as the leader first of the Labour Party, then of the country as a whole. For most of this time, he has been tolerated but unloved, a walking synonym for “wooden,” “stolid,” and “middle-aged haircut.” On Monday night, three days after the local election results came in, his Cabinet showed signs of abandoning him. Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary and one of Labour’s more convincing politicians, was one of several ministers who asked the Prime Minister to set a timetable for his departure. Around eighty members of the parliamentary party publicly made clear that they agreed, enough to set in motion a formal leadership challenge to Starmer, if they coalesce around a rival candidate.

But, at a Cabinet meeting in Downing Street on Tuesday morning, Starmer refused to step down, leaving British politics in that queasy, all-too-familiar zone in which no one knows what is happening and none of the possible futures look particularly appetizing. “The Labour Party has a process for challenging a leader and that has not been triggered,” Starmer told his Cabinet colleagues, according to a statement. “The country expects us to get on with governing.” I’m not sure the country expects much of anything anymore.

Something like this has been coming for a while. For the past year, Starmer has been bumbling along with a net approval rating below minus forty—about twice as bad as President Donald Trump’s—while Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform U.K. Party has led the polls. But, for the Labour Party, there was a difference between having an anxiety dream and waking up to find that it was real. About five thousand of England’s council seats were up for election last week, and Labour lost some fifteen hundred, about a quarter of its representatives in local government. The party stumbled to its worst result in the Scottish Parliament, and lost control of Welsh politics for the first time in a hundred years. But the headline results, bad as they were, masked Labour’s evisceration in places that have supported the Party more or less since its formation. Wigan, in Lancashire, has elected Labour M.P.s since 1918. Last week, twenty-five local councillors were up for reëlection, twenty-two from the Labour Party. Every single one lost. Reform took twenty-four of the twenty-five seats. “This election didn’t come down to big ideas,” Anas Sarwar, the Party’s leader in Scotland, said. “It came down to a big national wave and a general vibe that we couldn’t change.”

Starmer was at the center of that vibe and yet insufficient to explain it. He isn’t so interesting or consequential a politician to have caused such a degree of feeling. Zoom out and he is Friedrich Merz, in Germany, or Emmanuel Macron, in France, just another European centrist in a cruel world, hemorrhaging votes—whether because of Gaza, or immigration, or the cost of living, or a tired and dilapidated welfare state—to populist parties that didn’t exist, or didn’t matter, until ten years ago. One experienced Labour M.P. described canvassing during the recent campaign and taking flak from both Reform-inclined voters and Green Party supporters—Labour’s freshest rivals to the left—within the space of a few minutes. “That polarization was the clearest thing that I saw,” the M.P. said. “I could knock on doors that were literally next to each other and have people saying diametrically opposed things about Keir Starmer and the Labour Party.”

Apart from Labour’s losses, the most striking thing about the election results was how evenly the vote was distributed among Britain’s major political parties, of which there are now five. According to modelling by the BBC, if the whole country had voted, Labour, the Conservatives, the Green Party, and the Liberal Democrats all would have won between sixteen and eighteen per cent of the vote, with Reform a notch higher, at around twenty-six per cent. British politics in 2026 is a landscape of meh, with Farage’s grin poking over the horizon.

But, even if the forces at work are much larger than Starmer, he has proved unsuited to this moment. Since he took office, two summers ago, his premiership has been marked by a deep political clumsiness. His mistakes have included depriving vulnerable older people of a benefit to heat their homes; raising payroll taxes on employers, while simultaneously asking them to hire more young people; and seeking a new relationship with the European Union, but never spelling out what that means. For the past six months, Starmer has been haunted by his only flamboyant decision as Prime Minister: to hire Peter Mandelson, a suave old fixer, to be Ambassador to the U.S., only to dismiss him because of revelations about Mandelson’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. But even Mandelson, wasn’t a very flamboyant choice really. He was probably at the peak of his powers during the early days of Tony Blair’s New Labour government, almost thirty years ago. (He had to resign from that, too).

The politics that Starmer embodies is cautious, patriotic, a little square. Perhaps his greatest achievement as Prime Minister has been to stay out of Trump’s war in Iran, a decision for which he has received absolutely no credit, just an even tougher economic climate in which to enact a domestic-policy agenda that no one can ever remember. (When I checked the Labour Party website on Monday, it said, “Economic Stability. Secure borders. National Security.” Not exactly “La Marseillaise”). For most people, Starmerism is incrementalism leading nowhere in particular—a program that is nowhere near adequate to confront Britain’s economic stagnation or its political splintering.

Over the weekend, I spoke with Jonathan Rutherford, a longtime Labour adviser, who was invited into the government, briefly, last year. He despaired at the gulf between the party’s London-based leadership and the voters who live in the country’s post-industrialized former heartlands—a gulf that Starmer’s rather inert leadership has only deepened. “We’re living through an élite class that is, in cultural and political terms, wholly different to the people it claims to represent,” Rutherford told me. “Go up north. He is hated,” he said, of Starmer. “In a way, that’s sort of deeply unfair to him. He is viscerally hated, and I don’t think he understands that. I don’t think that people in No. 10 quite understand it.”

The question is whether replacing Starmer at this point will actually help, or make matters even worse. On Monday morning, the Prime Minister gave a speech that was intended to show that he understood the gravity of his situation and that his government must be bolder from now on. A few minutes before he stepped onstage, I spoke with a peer who has worked with Starmer and endured Labour’s ups and downs for decades.

The peer reminded me why the Party elected him in the first place—as an antidote to the soap opera of the Conservative party, which was in power at the time, and as a way to move on from Labour’s internal bickering under Jeremy Corbyn. “We voted for a man in a suit that wasn’t Boris Johnson or Liz Truss,” the peer said. “There was never deep love for him in the Party, but absolutely the awareness that this man could do it.” Whereas Labour’s former troubles were mostly ideological and internecine, the peer was struck by the external nature of the challenges it now faces—namely, Britain’s fiscal reality and the shallowness, and brittleness, of its public support. “During Corbyn, the problem was in the Labour Party. So we knew what to do,” the peer said. “It was really hard work, but it was within the Labour Party. This problem is not within the Labour Party. This problem is much bigger.”

Starmer’s speech—even the idea that a speech might still alter people’s perceptions at this stage—summed up everything about him. It was sincere but small-bore. He stressed the danger posed by Britain’s adversaries abroad and by Farage’s popularity at home. “This hurts,” Starmer said. “Not just because Labour has done badly, but because, if we don’t get this right, our country will go down a very dark path.” He was in his shirtsleeves, oddly enthused, still in campaign mode, even though the polls had closed four days earlier. Starmer promised narrative and emotion. “Stories beat spreadsheets,” he said. “People need hope.” And then, because he is Starmer, he announced a list of policies—the government would nationalize a steelworks, continue its negotiations with the E.U, and really crank up its work “in apprenticeships, in technical-excellence colleges, in special educational needs”—that made it sound like he was reading from a spreadsheet.

He was at his most convincing when he talked about the harm that would be caused by yet another change of Prime Minister—Starmer is the sixth of the past decade—and all the uncertainty that it would bring. “We tested it to destruction with the last government, and it inflicted huge damage on this country,” Starmer said. “Labour will never be forgiven if we repeat that.” And yet, within hours, that is what dozens of his colleagues were attempting to orchestrate. “I do have quite a lot of people saying to me they don’t want chaos,” the Labour M.P. told me. “And I understand that. However, they are much smaller in number than the number of people who have rejected the Labour Party this time. So, there will have to be a change.”

The problem for the Party—and for Starmer, in a curious way—is that he has no obvious successor. All of the likely contenders face considerable obstacles of their own. Wes Streeting, the country’s ambitious young Health Secretary, is disliked on the left of the Party and stalked by questions about his own relationship with Mandelson. Angela Rayner, Starmer’s charismatic former deputy, has been undergoing a tax investigation. (She was cleared of wrongdoing). Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Manchester, doesn’t have a seat in the House of Commons, so one would have to be engineered for him. Other possible candidates include Mahmood, the Home Secretary, who isn’t widely known to the public, and Ed Miliband, a former leader of the Party, whose spell in charge was littered with mistakes that weren’t all that dissimilar from Starmer’s. As the adrenaline levels rose on Monday and Tuesday, and the familiar choreography of another British political crisis began to play out—ministerial resignations, spiky statements on X—the collateral damage that Starmer had warned against started to encroach, once again, upon the scene. The pound fell against the dollar. The stock market tottered. The interest rate on thirty-year British government bonds rose to its highest level since 1998.

By Wednesday morning, a jittery calm had returned. Starmer’s realism—or obstinacy, depending on your point of view—had seen off an immediate challenge. None of his senior Cabinet ministers had resigned. Streeting, who was thought the most eager to break cover, walked into Downing Street for an early-morning confrontation with the Prime Minister. Reporters standing outside timed the meeting at sixteen or seventeen minutes. Either way, Streeting left without a word.

The main reason that the crisis had paused was that Wednesday was set aside for one of Westminster’s grand ceremonial occasions: when the monarch opens the new parliamentary session. I arrived at Downing Street not long after Streeting left. The roads were closed to traffic and there was the sound of marching bands. Overnight, indentations in the tarmac had been filled with sand, to ease the passing of the royal carriages. Tall soldiers in bearskin caps shuffled a few inches to the left, or right, to give the parade its proper visual proportions. There was a sudden spring shower, which stiffened into rain. Just after 10:30 A.M., Starmer’s motorcade swept out and the band played “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

The rain had cleared by the time King Charles came past, half an hour later. In Parliament Square, the music was drowned out by the peals of Westminster Abbey. The Household Cavalry, on dark horses and with brightly shining breastplates, trotted past, jingling like a cutlery drawer. The King rode in the Irish State Coach, built in 1852, accompanied by the royal Bargemaster. The machinery of the British state is still a sombre, stirring thing to behold. Inside, in accordance with custom, the King sat on a throne in the House of Lords and read out the government’s legislative program for the year ahead, as if it were his own. “My government will respond to this world with strength and aim to create a country that is fair for all,” he said. There were thirty-seven bills in all, covering everything from leasehold reform to a new form of digital I.D. card. Few of them were contentious; even fewer were particularly ambitious.

The scene was impressive but beside the point. There have been a dozen political crises in Britain in the past decade, when Prime Ministers have fallen, elections have been called, and helicopters clattered overhead. But what is different about the downfall of Starmer, which is now under way, has been the timidity of his premiership, its chronic self-doubt, as if its voice were permanently stuck in its throat. For almost two years, Labour has enjoyed a working majority of a hundred and sixty-five seats in the House of Commons—allowing it the kind of political freedom that other centrist governments around the world can only dream of—and yet all it has managed to do is trip over itself. As the King intoned the details of Starmer’s legislative agenda, no one in the chamber really believed that the Prime Minister would be around to implement it. “I pray that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels,” the King said. Starmer will be replaced, most likely by Burnham, before Labour has to face the public at a general election. When the ceremony was over, news spread on people’s phones that Streeting was getting ready to mount his challenge. He resigned on Thursday to start this campaign. “Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift,” Streeting wrote. Power in Britain has never felt as hollow as this. ♦

The sailor said, “Brandy, you’re a fine girl” (You’re a fine girl)
What a good wife you would be (Such a fine girl)
But my life, my love, and my lady is the sea—Looking Glass.

He is late.

Technically, the sea has made him late—again. The sea is “eternal” and “vast” and “answerable to no clock,” which is exactly the kind of language you use when you don’t respect a 3 P.M. standing appointment.

I am sitting on a tasteful beige sofa in Dr. Feldman’s office. There is a tabletop fountain burbling in the corner, which is a little on the nose. The intake form asked me to describe “the nature of the conflict.” I wrote: “Competing mistress, aquatic.”

Dr. Feldman clears her throat. “Brandy, do we think he’ll be joining us today?”

I glance at the empty chair beside me. “He’s very busy,” I reply. “His life, his love, and his lady is the sea.”

Dr. Feldman blinks. “Can you say that again?”

“He repeats it like it’s his mantra,” I explain. “ ‘My life, my love, and my lady is the sea.’ ” I try not to do the voice, but it slips out—husky, horizon-facing, nautical.

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Like I’ve been emotionally outsourced to the brine,” I mutter.

To be clear, I have been supportive. When he brings me gifts from far away—a ship in a cheap plastic bottle, a commemorative spoon from Señor Frog’s, an “I ❤️ Guam” bumper sticker—I receive them with grace. I even wear the braided silver chain “from the north of Spain.” It itches.

Dr. Feldman folds her hands. “Has he expressed a willingness to prioritize the relationship?”

“He once told me I was ‘a fine girl,’ ” I say. “He believes I would make a ‘good wife.’ ”

“And?”

“And then he pledges fealty to a large, damp expanse.”

There is a pause. The fountain burbles.

“Brandy,” Dr. Feldman says, carefully, “when he says that the sea is his lady, what do you hear?”

“I hear that I’m in a throuple with the Deep.”

I have tried to engage with the sea directly on the matter. I stood on the dock one night and shouted directly into her raging glory: “What are your intentions?” A wave took my shoe.

The receptionist knocks softly, then enters, and hands Dr. Feldman a note.

“Ah,” she says to me. “He called.”

My heart lifts—the traitor. “Is he coming?”

“He said he’s running late.”

“Of course he is.”

“He added that he cannot stay long.”

“Of course he can’t.”

“Also,” she squints, “that his life, his love, and his lady is the sea.”

I close my eyes. Somewhere, a buoy clangs. “Did he at least ask how I am?”

“He asked if we validate parking.”

Look—I do my best to understand that the harbor is his home. I have gazed into his eyes when he tells those endless sailor stories and I have felt the ocean rise and fall in them. I have felt it rise and fall in me, too, which is inconvenient when you are trying to balance a tray of whiskey.

But here is what I would like entered into the record: I am not a port. I am not a picturesque backdrop for his monologue. I am a woman and a waitress who lays whiskey down with surgical precision. I have survived Fleet Week.

Dr. Feldman leans forward. “What would you say to him if he were here?”

“I’d say,” I begin, “that if your lady is the sea, you should at least have the decency to stop telling other women they’d make good wives. I’d say that I am not asking him to drain the ocean. I am asking him to show up.”

The fountain gurgles, chastened.

“And if he can’t?” Dr. Feldman asks, gently.

I stand. I remove the locket that bears his name, drop it into a wastebasket, and walk out. As I leave the office, I notice that the tide is coming in.

Let her. ♦

When I first moved to Brooklyn, in 2010, a small, stapled, glossy print product became my guide to my new neighborhood of Bushwick and beyond. The L Magazine covered the hipster-ridden stretch of the L train into Williamsburg, listing happy-hour deals, chronicling restaurant openings, and reviewing art exhibitions. Given out for free in streetside orange boxes and in stacks at cafés, The L was stylish and well-informed, highlighting locally famous names and haunts, and establishing a sense of shared community for the corridor. I even contributed a review or two of Williamsburg galleries before the publication folded, in 2015.

Recently, I moved back to Brooklyn after a years-long stint in Washington, D.C., to Boerum Hill, and this time around my guide to the neighborhood has not been a print magazine but an e-mail newsletter. The “Boerum Bulletin,” launched on Substack last year, is the very part-time work of Edward Dornblaser, a health-care-industry consultant, who jots down observations during dog walks. “Boerum Bulletin” has informed me about the beloved bar Montero being sold, the successor to a closed Blank Street Coffee location, and the price of a last-minute ticket to see Bruce Springsteen at Barclays Center. Dornblaser’s project started as an e-mailed list of recommendations for friends moving to Boerum Hill; now, as a newsletter, it has more than a thousand subscribers. The endeavor is “extremely no frills and very intentionally not built to scale,” Dornblaser told me. “If it can help an area feel more like a neighborhood, that’s worth it to me.”

“Boerum Bulletin” is one of many new local newsletters within the borough. Brooklyn readers can also subscribe to the “Court Street Journal,” the “Grand Army Gazette,” or “The Carroll Gardens Times”. Beyond New York City, there is “Catskill Crew,” upstate; “The Eastside Rag,” in Los Angeles; and “Wichita Life,” in Kansas, to name only a few. Some of these digital pamphlets provide terse, functional updates while others act as the successors to bygone alt-weeklies, covering cultural happenings and carrying out local-interest investigations. Several newsletter writers told me that they were inspired by “Feed Me,” Emily Sundberg’s popular New York newsletter, which has proved the vitality of local retail and night-life commentary. What these projects have in common is a desire to fight back against two forces: the disintegration of local media and the impersonality of the algorithmic internet, which aims content at the widest possible audience. As Dornblaser put it, “You’re more likely to be served restaurant recommendations for Paris or real-time updates on a Senate primary than relevant information about what is happening in your own neighborhood.”

The newsletters tend to be solo operations with small-scale followings, but, when your purview is geographically limited, you don’t need many subscribers to become an influential force. In 2023, Alexa Tietjen Dornagon launched “Court Street Journal,” an e-mail newsletter focussed on what she called “West Brooklyn,” the waterfront-abutting neighborhoods that Court Street traverses north to south. Dornagon had worked as a journalist covering beauty at Women’s Wear Daily; “Court Street Journal” was designed to feel like a “storybook,” Dornagon said, with watercolor-style illustrations of leafy city streets and independent storefronts that reflected the serene mood of Carroll Gardens, where Dornagon has now lived for six years. She and I met one recent morning at Le Petit Café, a neighborhood institution since 1999, with a replica of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” on the ceiling and cappuccinos served with a retro dusting of cinnamon. Outside buzzed the controversial Court Street bike lane, the subject of a recent lawsuit which Dornagon covered closely. “Court Street Journal” now has more than a thousand subscribers, nearly a hundred of them paying. Dornagon still holds a full-time job in retail conferences, but she considers “Court Street Journal” a success in helping her neighbors to “feel more connected to where they live.” She gave the newsletter its institutional-sounding name as an aspirational gesture: “I wanted it to feel like it was bigger than just me,” she said.

There are strategic benefits to going narrow but deep. The e-mail newsletter platform Beehiiv has found that the so-called click-through rate for neighborhood newsletters is two and a half times higher than that of the average newsletter across the platform. Preeya Goenka, Beehiiv’s chief customer officer, told me, “The more hyper-local and hyper-niche you make your content, the more engaged your audience might be.” Many of the newsletter proprietors I spoke to sounded surprised by the enthusiasm with which readers paid for subscriptions, and by the hunger for neighborhood news. “It’s not like you need a huge apparatus to do this; you just need one person who’s on the ground talking to people,” John Fulton, the creator of “The Eastside Rag,” told me. Fulton covers sections of the city east of the 101 Freeway, writing voicey blurbs that collect upcoming events, intriguing real-estate listings, and niche celebrity gossip. (Did you know that Jacob Elordi, Austin Butler, and Jeremy Allen White all shop at Golden Age, a Silver Lake menswear boutique?) Fulton still works a job in entertainment marketing, writing at a coffee shop at 7 A.M. and on his lunch break, but “Eastside Rag” is a growing concern, with more than fifty-five hundred subscribers, a fifth of them paying; most newsletters get only five or ten per cent of free subscribers to pay.

Readers may feel invested because they have few other ways to learn the kind of relatively mundane but highly useful information that this new batch of newsletters cover. In decades past, publications such as Time Out and Flavorpill offered plentiful listings; now, if you try to Google local happenings, you’re likely to be met with automatic A.I.-generated answers or a mess of meaningless S.E.O. websites. There are many outlets in which to read an opinion about national politics; fewer about a corner bar. The local-newsletter genre is an old form of media, made new–as Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, put it to me, “Reinventing the wheel is underrated.” Tasbeeh Herwees, the creator of another Los Angeles newsletter, “No Bad Days,” which has twenty-seven hundred subscribers, told me that she was inspired by the alt-weeklies she grew up reading–L.A. Weekly, L.A. Magazine. Herwees’s publication, which she maintains alongside full-time copywriting work, mingles culture features (including a recent investigation of dysfunction at the Los Angeles Review of Books) with more lowbrow city coverage, such as a running interview column called “The LA It Girl Index.”

In the era of atomized feeds and generative A.I., people often talk about craving “community” online, and what is a neighborhood if not a physical, unavoidable community? You engage with it every time you step outside. In that sense, perhaps collecting people who care deeply about the same places is a more promising digital model than trying to appeal to everyone everywhere. Isaac Rangaswami, a former tech-company copywriter, first grew a following around an Instagram account called @caffs_not_cafes, which highlighted historic, low-key, unheralded London canteens. From there he launched “Wooden City,” a Substack newsletter that covers less-than-hyped London spots. Recent entries include a list of “50 of the best pubs I’ve been to,” an impressive compendium of London’s used bookstores, and an essayistic guide to traversing the city on foot. “Wooden City” now has more than twelve thousand subscribers and sustains Rangaswami’s career as an independent writer. “There’s a desire for people to read writing where the writer has actually been to the place they’re writing about,” he told me. The newsletter “had to be very, very practical for people to pay for it—pure utility-first writing,” he added. For all of the internet’s voluminousness, it has neglected a very traditional role: that of the town crier, informing the populace block by block. ♦

By now, half the world has registered an opinion on Kylie Jenner’s nipple-forward Venus de Milo homage or the clipper ship perched on Madonna’s head at this year’s Met Gala. But few have seen the T.S.A.-level machinations behind the deployment of the overdressed guests from their staging areas to the museum’s steps. The Mark Hotel, on Seventy-seventh Street and Madison, was a center of the hubbub, with a hundred and fifty-three rooms and suites booked out to various glam squads.

“Everything is timed!” Maria Wittorp, the hotel’s head concierge, said, with the haste of an auctioneer, standing in the lobby, as blazer-wearing staffers whipped by. “We only have someone come down when their van is ready.” Wittorp, who has worked the event six times, channelled the gala’s dress code (“Fashion Is Art”) by wearing a pair of bug-eye glasses. “They’re Alain Mikli,” she said. “Elton John has worn his designs.” She raced off, gripping an orange clipboard.

The room buzzed.

“My radio is out. Wait, I think it’s my earpiece.”

“Murray, you’re breaking up.”

“This is my first one,” a Mark sales executive named Cher Liu said. She thumbed through a thick packet with the names and photos of every guest, as if cramming for a final. A woman tried to come down the central stairs. “You’re going to have to wait!” a manager told her. “No one through the lobby!” Another woman, in a short skirt and leopard-print heels, slipped by him, holding an empty Martini glass.

Wittorp scurried over to a curtained side entrance. The drapes opened, and in walked Anna Wintour in turquoise-feathered Chanel. She beelined out the street door, where her van awaited. Departures had officially started.

The lobby’s elevator doors opened and a woman with a giant white saucer on her head and a matching floor-length coat, embellished with red splotches that evoked stab wounds, slowly exited. It was Naomi Osaka. “You guys gotta move back,” a security guard shouted to a pack of photographers in the room. Osaka stood by a reception desk, apparently early for her driver.

The elevator opened again. Liu gripped her packet. Shuffling noises were heard, and then a pointy white gown popped into the lobby. Its wearer was the tech entrepreneur Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo (trickle-down evidence of the gala’s unspoken Silicon Valley subtheme). Kuo showed off her ice-queen garb and noticed a friend in the corner. “Sam! Hi!” she said. The singer Sam Smith, in a black cape dress, stood still as an aide held a portable fan up to their head, which supported a large black feather.

Sprinting through the scene, someone yelled, “I need the lady! I need the lady!”

Elevator doors opened: Venus Williams, in a crystal collar necklace that Ruth Bader Ginsburg might have enjoyed. She dragged a long black train across the marble lobby. (“Our floors are top-tier clean,” a concierge with braces on her teeth said.)

“Do you guys have truffle fries?”

“Could you give me two more keys to our room, under ‘Swarovski’?”

The K-pop star Ahn Hyo-seop waited by the desk, a helper in a surgical mask prodding at his face with a makeup brush. A service door swung open behind Ahn, almost hitting his striped Valentino jacket. The helper jumped to action: now the hair above Ahn’s right ear was out of place.

“Have you seen a tripod? It was leaning right there.”

“What’s the Wi-Fi password?”

Doors opened: Alexander Wang. “Should I go first?” he asked. “No,” someone on his team said. He ended up waiting for the Russian model Irina Shayk, who soon appeared holding a quivering small dog.

Elevator opened: Maude Apatow stepped out. “It’s the girl from ‘Euphoria’!” a staffer said, embarrassed that he didn’t know her name. “I had a list for this!” Next came Chase Infiniti, wearing a colorful trompe-l’oeil Thom Browne dress (another Venus de Milo tribute). Liu earnestly flipped through her packet.

The queue for vans was growing. Someone spurted hair spray on Tate McRae’s long locks. The actress Tessa Thompson explained her blue fingers: “It’s latex!” Joe Burrow, an N.F.L. quarterback, stood by the stairs in a navy Bode suit with bedazzled lapels, kicking his feet from side to side. “Can I have my phone real quick?” he politely asked an aide.

Finally, a lull. It was time for the last departure: Cardi B, who was behind schedule. “We should all clap for her,” a staffer said.

The elevator floor lights clicked downward. 5. 4. 3. 2. The doors opened. The car was empty. Groans all around. Photographers put down their cameras.

The lights blinked again. 4. 3. 2. The big reveal: a cluster of black umbrellas, which quickly opened.

“That’s seven years of bad luck!” a disappointed spectator yelled. Shielded by her team, Cardi B shuffled out to the street, a blob of black nylon. The umbrellas were folded, and the van sped off to drive the four blocks to the Met. ♦